1. Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to printing systems and methods, and especially methods ad systems for improving the performance of workflow in a production environment, such as a document production environment or printing environment. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to systems and methods for improving the routing of jobs, such as print jobs, in a production environment.
2. Background
Document production environments, such as print shops, convert printing orders, such as print jobs, into finished printed material. A print shop m-ay process print jobs using resources, such as printers cutters, collators and other similar equipment. Typically resources in print shops are organized such that when a print job arrives from a customer at a particular print shop, the print job can be processed by performing one or more production functions.
Scheduling architectures that organize print jobs received by a document production environment and route the print jobs are known in the art. Exemplary scheduling architectures are described in, for example. U.S. Pat. No. 7,051,328 to Rai et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 7,065,567 to Squires et al. The exemplary architectures receive print jobs and route the print jobs to autonomous cells. Autonomous cells typically include one or more resources needed to completely process an entire job.
The exemplary scheduling architectures appropriately route print jobs in many cases. However, in some cases, the allocation of print jobs using such algorithms can be unbalanced among autonomous cells. If print job allocation is unbalanced among autonomous cells, the overall efficiency of the document production environment could be reduced. This could manifest itself by having, more print jobs complete late, having late jobs complete later than otherwise necessary, and/or underutilizing particular resources.